ST. PETERSBURG - The last time he heard from his wife, she was huddled with 150 other tired and frightened medical students at the shutdown airport in Grenada. They were hoping for food, for water, for a way out.
Candace Hinote, a 25-year-old first year medical student from St. Petersburg, had survived a direct hit by Ivan, a Category 4 hurricane. She hadn't had anything to eat or drink for two days after Ivan wrecked the tiny island nation. She had blisters on her mouth and feet. She was being asked to pay $2,000 in cash to get on a commuter plane off the tiny island.
"People at the airport are telling them they're not going to get out unless they give them money," her husband, Drew Hinote, said Friday morning. His wife and other students had taken turns calling from a pay phone at the airport.
Later in the day he received good news from the Web site operated by St. George's University, where his wife started medical school a few weeks ago. The State Department would be ferrying four planes back and forth between Grenada and Trinidad today, it said, planning to fly at least 800 people off the island by darkness.
Drew Hinote, a newlywed of only six weeks, summed up his feelings in one word: "Amazing." He hopes to hear today that his wife is in Trinidad and on the way home.
His outlook had changed dramatically from earlier in the day. His wife had called, scared and hungry and telling of looters who had made it on to St. George's University, the same medical school where terrified students had gotten caught up in a coup that resulted in the 1983 U.S. invasion of the island.
Friday, on a school Web site, parents, other relatives and friends had posted frantic e-mails trying to find out about their loved ones.
Grenada was shredded, a wasteland of flattened houses, twisted metal and splintered wood. Ivan damaged 90 percent of homes there, tossed sailboats to shore and set off looting among some of the 100,000 residents left without electricity, water and telephone service. More than 20 are presumed dead.
Candace Hinote had been in Grenada for a little more than a month. A 1997 graduate of St. Petersburg High School's International Baccalaureate program, she attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., and graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of South Florida. She has a master's degree in public health from New York Medical College and is considering becoming a surgeon, her husband said.
As the powerful hurricane approached Grenada, Hinote said he and his wife knew there was no chance for her to get off the island before it hit.
"I just told her to get water and get somewhere where the structure was strong and (that) I wanted to be there with her," he said.
"She had been evacuated since the night before the hurricane hit and they put her in a lecture hall with about 50 to 75 people. I got to talk to her about 30 seconds the morning after it happened. She said the roof had been damaged and all the windows were blown out and she hadn't seen her dorm. Her dorm was right on the beach."
Angela Aggeler, a spokesperson for consular affairs with the State Department, said earlier Friday a group had gone to Grenada to assist American citizens.
In addition, she said, about 100 guards from other Caribbean nations have landed on the island to help maintain order and to secure the university campus.
Though Hinote wants his wife home, he worries about what she could face.
"They are talking about getting her home," he said. "And she's going to get home just in time to go through it all over again."
- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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